Nvidia Chief Sees ‘Exponential’ Growth in AI

Nvidia reported strong results from its Quadro graphics card line, which generated revenue of $235 million in the quarter ending July 30. That represented growth of 9.5% compared to the same period one year ago, making last quarter the strongest for Nvidia’s pro visualization market segment in at least two years. Officials said the market was driven by high-end demand for real-time rendering and mobile workstations.

In a conference call announcing the results, CEO Jensen Huang cited Nvidia’s new OptiX 5.0 AI ray-tracing technology and external eGPU offering for mobile workstations as potential drivers of future growth. And he seemed even more bullish on the prospects for GPU-accelerated AI in general.

“Our GPUs are essentially increasing in performance by approximately three times each year,” he said. “In order to be 100 times in just four years we have to increase overall system performance by over a factor of three every year. On top of it, the neural network architecture and the algorithms that are being developed are improving in accuracy by about twice each year. So object-recognition accuracy is improving by twice each year … and speech recognition is improving by a factor of two each year, and so you’ve got these two exponentials that are happening, and it’s pretty exciting. That’s one of the reasons why AI is moving so fast.”

Paradoxically, despite beating Wall Street estimates in the quarter, Nvidia saw its stock fall after the announcement as investors got spooked by concerns over the company’s data center business, which didn’t grow as much in this quarter as it had in the previous one.

About the Author

Bryant Frazer has been covering production and post-production technology since 1998, when he wrote about video compression and disc replication technology as the editor of DVD Report. He is the editorial director and associate publisher of StudioDaily.

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